Eye-popping new cost estimates released for NuScale small modular reactor
ieefa.org
ieefa.org
https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-power-nuscale-clean-energ...
So the state of nuclear is pretty bad in terms of "new nuclear" costs. Lazard LCOE has it basically at 500-600% more expensive than equivalent solar/wind. Yes, baseload, yes all that.
I'm probably known as a killjoy on nuclear on here over costs, but I really do think nuclear power is the coolest thing in the world and has a place in our energy future.
We just have to figure something out with regards to a competitive design. I personally think we keep retreading solid fuel designs that have hidden structural costs and paranoia-inducing issues with the public. Mostly, the dreaded nuclear waste and its transport and the fear-inducing long half lifes.
A LFTR/liquid design can theoretically use virtually all the fuel, so there is no "waste", or at least waste transport. Breeder type reactors IIRC can also take existing long halflife waste and transmute it to usable fuel isotopes again. I know it isn't actually that simple, but it is a lot better.
I simply think that is the closed waste cycle that will get a lot of regulatory hurdles over the hump. But we are probably a decade from even a design.
Nuscale was the shining star of the current generation of "practical nuclear". This sucks, because at least it kept an iron hot.
People with expertise in building plants have been trying to dispel the idea that SMNRs will ever manage to be cost effective.
Even if you could manage to build them cheaply, which is a massive if, that doesn’t mean that the electricity they produce will be cheap. This is a classic example of horizontal scaling, which is tried and tested way of producing an expensive final product.
The nuclear power plant isn’t the product it’s the factory, electricity is the product. The smaller your factory/process, the less scaling laws work in your favor.
Take solar for example; solar panels are not the factory, a whole solar farm is the factory. Residential rooftop solar produces more expensive electricity than commercial rooftop solar, which produces electricity more expensive than utility scale solar. The panels can be the same, it’s all the other stuff, the “balance of plant”, that has a more fixed cost which you don’t get to spread out over as many panels. Same problem for SMNRs.
Such that over years of successive improvements, there is an active downward pressure on price and upward progress in features / improvements / utility.
The promise of the SMNR is really the closet-sized ORNL reactor. Of course that doesn't involve lots of chemical processing support systems, but the reactor wasn't that big. And yes getting a Brayton cycle turbine attached and combined cycle generators to max output won't fit in a closet.
But ... still, it would be the path forward to the biggest challenges to nuclear:
1) actual cost
2) reliably delivering on budget
As the comment above you points out, the ship sailed on nuclear ten years ago when the window of it being competitive with wind/solar was open. Now it's been buried.
As it stands, we are left with China to possibly figure it out.
This is not correct. I explicitly address this. An SMNR is not comparable to an individual solar panel, it is comparable to a whole solar instalation. See my comment again.
The individual parts of a solar instaltion are mass produced, e.g. individual panels. Whether a single solar panel is 6ft by 10ft or 60ft by 100ft does not really affect it's performance. The individual panels are made the size they are now, i.e. small, for convenience of transport, installation, and replacement. But the final power plant is made as big as possible in order to gain the benefits of economies of scale. The price of residential solar > price of commercial rooftop > utility scale solar.
> As it stands, we are left with China to possibly figure it out.
China so far has not figured it out. If anything the lack of progress that nuclear has made relative to wind/solar/hydro shows how difficult it is for it to compete. Nuclear energy production capacity has been growing, but at a fairly constant rate. wind/solar/hydro meanwhile has been growing at an ever increasing rate, which far surpases that of nuclear.
The BWRX-300 (300MW) build proposals in Canada at Darlington seem more realistic. Not small, not that modular, but the closest to SMR.
I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. The time to incorporate tech advancements in construction was pre-2010, or at a bare minimum to have a mere one new build in France, the US, the UK, or Finland succeed in a way that seemed like it could be replicated. Now, it's too late, and other tech has advanced too far.
Nobody is even talking about how to halve the cost of nuclear, they are only trying to make it less likely to have a build failure.
Plus, I've never heard anyone cite cost numbers for an A2W, but I'm not sure there's a reason it could compete on cost. Military hardware is not known for having the cheapest options, quite the contrary.